James Daunt, the Waterstones managing director, says that the "plateauing" of ebook sales means the UK's largest dedicated high-street bookseller is now "confident we can sell enough books to keep ourselves alive".

Daunt is speaking after an industry conference on Thursday, where he has told a room full of independent publishers that Waterstones was "committed to the idea that bookshops matter". Though there are "huge challenges" in the book world, he tells the Guardian, "whereas everyone was looking into a dark deep pit a couple of years ago, today there is a lot of light, particularly for publishers but even for Waterstones".

Ebook growth, says Daunt, is "plateauing, and we are probably getting to the point where there is a sensible degree of equilibrium. The big question for us was: would this happen at the point when enough of the physical would remain for us to survive? It would always be more than half, but it needed for us to be enough to survive, and that looks much more likely now to be the case." A report last year into ebook growth in the US, which is ahead of the UK when it comes to digital takeup, showed "the share of all new ebooks sold – both in units and dollars – has been flat at about 30% and just under 15% respectively".

The loss-making high-street retailer is "picking up the odd crumb which falls from Amazon's table" when it comes to ebooks – it stocks Amazon's ereader, the Kindle, in its 300 shops – but it is "wedded very much to physical" books, says Daunt. "Digital does something different. It has a place, but most people tend to want both."

Daunt, a former independent bookseller, was hired by Alexander Mamut when the Russian billionaire bought Waterstones from HMV in 2011, and led a major reorganisation of the bookseller last summer which saw 200 of the chain's 487 store managers leave the company. Waterstones is now starting to open new stores, with a recent addition unveiled in Blackburn and one planned in Ringwood.

"We've got a very long list of places we think there should be a bookshops," says Daunt. "Not a big one, just a nice little bookshop with a cafe."

He is also planning a major overhaul of Waterstones's website. "It's pathetic in relation to Amazon and that's just a fact," he says. "We have 3,500 booksellers with an awful lot of knowledge, we've got authors coming through our shops – all sorts of things which are very different to Amazon – and we are keen to harness that and put it on the website. Do we want to be able to sell as cheaply and quickly and efficiently as them? We would like to do quick and efficient but I don't want to sell a pair of trainers at the same time as a book. We don't want to do that."

Daunt also plans to continue selling the Kindle from Waterstones stores, even though "recommending a major competitor's product causes certain difficulties". But "what simplifies it for me – and I can understand that my publishing colleagues find it inexplicable – is that I come back to what the customer wants, and I find that makes it easy. At the moment, customers do want to read digitally, and they want a very good ecosystem associated with their digital demands. And at the moment, the Kindle is the one that is best. If we were to sell anything else it would be inferior, and we would never do that. So at the moment, it is the right decision for our branches to sell the Kindle."

And Daunt is happy the product is bringing people into shops, even if it means they are then going online to buy ebooks. "I would much rather customers were in the shops, and I know they will pick up books too," he says. "That's life."

The new website, which is due to launch in July, will also sell self-published books, says Daunt – who has been turned to the DIY cause after initially seeing it as "unutterable dross".

"I have been converted to the virtues of self-publishing a long time ago," he says. "People do want to read cheap and cheerful or specialist stuff, or stuff by Uncle Bob. We as booksellers, if we can help people find what they want to read, then that is great. Oddly, our real problem and our real challenge is how much time people are giving to reading. Is the explosive growth of tablets and social media going to mean people spend less time reading? [Self-publishing] is doing a lot to answer the question of how to keep people reading and not watching Netflix. [It] is part of the answer to that."

The chain's bookshops, though, will "remain curated", says Daunt. "Bookshops are a place to find books, where you can feel them, get excited by them. If you get that oomph when you walk out, whether through a recommendation or a cover or a conversation, that little thrill is what gets you to read the book that night, and come back to the shop. Bookshops are hugely important part of getting people reading. If we weren't there, there would be an awful lot less reading and less books being sold. You wouldn't find that interesting book from, say, [independent publisher] Pushkin Press."

It is "extremely difficult" to discover new books on Amazon, says Daunt. Online bookselling, in this respect, is "so much less efficient than a high-street bookshop".

"And it's this miracle," he says, "that this nice owner understood that and kept Waterstones alive."